Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Biography

Emeritus Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people (Moreton Bay). She is Australia’s first Indigenous Distinguished Professor and is Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland. Her leadership and contribution to Indigenous studies is across policy, research and global intellectual standing. As Director of the Australian Research Council’s National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN), she developed and led an Indigenous postgraduate and early career researchers national research capacity building program. Distinguished Professor Moreton-Robinson provided policy advice on Indigenous Higher Education to three Ministers of Education, first as Deputy Chair of the Indigenous Higher Education Council and subsequently as President of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium (NATSIHEC). She led the development of the terms of reference for the Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People. Her most recent contribution to building the discipline of Indigenous Studies is her leadership in securing the first ARC Centre of Excellence in Indigenous Futures to advance research in Closing the Gap.

Emeritus Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people (Moreton Bay). She is Australia’s first Indigenous Distinguished Professor and is Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland. She was formerly the Director of the Australian Research Council’s National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN), a national program that has capacity built Indigenous postgraduate students and early career researchers. Distinguished Professor Moreton-Robinson served as President of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education Consortium (NATSIHEC) in 2019. She is the founding President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association.

Professor Moreton-Robinson’s numerous publications have international standing and global reach. The twentieth anniversary edition of her first monograph Talkin Up to the White Woman: Indigenous women and Feminism was released in July 2020 selling 2000 copies in a matter of days. Her recent monograph The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015) won the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s (NAISA) subsequent book prize in 2016. Her edited collection entitled Critical Indigenous Studies: First World Locations and Engagement was published by Minnesota Press in 2016. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, published by Routledge in December 2020. Professor Moreton-Robinson served on several editorial boards including American Quarterly, the Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies, Australian Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies Review and Critical Ethnic Studies.  She was the founding editor of the International eJournal of Critical Indigenous Studies. In 2020, Professor Moreton-Robinson was elected, as the first Indigenous scholar outside of the USA, to be an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in the same year she was conferred as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, in 2023 she became a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2024 she was elected a Fellows of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.